The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter April 2024
The grain is gone
The first Warner Home Video LD release of Robert Altman’s 1971 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Oct 91) was massively grainy. Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography had a limited amount of augmented lighting and since the film is set in 1902 on the edge of civilization in the overcast Pacific Northwest, mostly during winter, there isn’t all that much light to go around. Nevertheless, by the time The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray (Dec 16), the grain had miraculously been resolved. The image was still quite dark because the interiors, realistically, just don’t have that many oil lamps (how in the world did people read books in those days?), but the grain was finessed and the presentation was very satisfying. Now Warner and Criterion have upped the ante even more with a beautiful two-platter 4K Blu-ray (UPC#715515292313, $50). The second platter is the same standard BD that was released previously. The 4K presentation has colors that are a touch more subdued—this seems to be endemic of many Criterion color 4K releases—but the basic illumination is a touch brighter, so you can see more details amid the shadows and the rain. Because the colors are not pushed as much, whatever lingering grain remained with the standard BD is smoothed over on the 4K presentation. When you toggle back and forth, while the standard BD is prettier, in this case the 4K presentation feels not just more correct, but more satisfying, more in keeping with the dramatic tone of the film itself and its remarkable staging.
The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.4:1. There appears to be no difference in the quality of the monophonic sound. Some of the dialog is accompanied by some vague background noise on both versions, but the three Leonard Cohen songs (which, Altman admits in the special features, guided his subconscious during the composition of the film) that stretch throughout the 121-minute movie are solid and clear. There are optional English subtitles and both versions come with the commentary featuring Altman and producer David Foster. As we reported previously, the standard BD also contains a marvelous 55-minute retrospective documentary; a 36-minute appreciation of the film’s artistry; a 10-minute 1971 production featurette; a 38-minute talk in front of an audience by art and production designers Al Locatelli, Leon Ericksen and Jack De Govia from 1999; a 12-minute interview with Zsigmond; a great collection of production photos in still frame; a 1971 Dick Cavett Show interview with film critic Pauline Kael running 11 minutes; and an 11-minute Cavett interview with Altman also from 1971.
As we have stated previously, for more than a half of a century now, of the fifty thousand or so motion pictures we have seen, McCabe & Mrs. Miller remains our favorite film. Since we have written about the movie extensively in the past, we will avoid redundancies and just point out that while artistic excellence is a key component, a favorite film is an emotional response, a fusion between the viewer’s inner being and the beheld work of art. With humor, with an incredibly innovative approach to direction (the extras are acting as much as the principals, which is why an accurate and clear rendition of the background dialog, which the BDs do provide, is so critical to the entertainment), and with a production design process that, by mirroring the drama, pulls the viewer through the story’s advancement in both a tactile and an emotional manner, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is as rich in inference as it is in presentation. The stars, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, bring their established screen personas and the film histories behind those personas to burn brightly in the center of the complex shades of ambition, desire and limited Nineteenth Century educations that Altman devises for their characters. No matter how much obfuscation he throws their way, the souls of their characters are still palpable. Finally, there is Cohen, a Canadian whose music, being ever present, speaks to the complex and vastly underappreciated legacy of entwined pioneering that America and Canada shared, something the movies usually overlook in favor of America’s sexier history with Mexico. It is Altman who weds Cohen’s music not just to the locale, but to the climate, as a reminder that the past is always present in our surroundings just as Cohen’s music quite readily imbeds itself with permanence in the mind of the listener. The atmosphere created by the film’s aural and visual components thereby, through the outstanding Criterion 4K BD release, create a perfect storm of longing for the past, celebrating the present and looking forward to a future where the movie can be shared again and again.
A Robinson triple play
Kino Lorber Incorporated continues to push forward their wonderful Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema three-disc Blu-ray sets, dredging up a seemingly unending display of forgotten treasures from the days when movies made for weekly or bi-weekly theatrical play were America’s primary form of entertainment, even though television was beginning to loom over the industry in the same way that the atomic bomb had brought a cloud to the complacency of American life itself. Embracing desperation became a theme for both, and who better embodies desperation than the great iconic motion picture star, Edward G. Robinson, who under the shadow of the Cold War blacklists (he was ‘grey listed’) was obligated to grab ready cash with every deal that came his way. Three fantastic black-and-white Robinson features from United Artists have been gathered by MGM and Kino for the latest terrific installment in the KL Studio Classics series, Film Noir The Dark Side of Cinema XVII (UPC#738329264246, $50). The films are so good that is best NOT to watch the set as a triple bill, but to allow time to savor each movie before its pleasures are superseded by the next. Each monophonic film is accompanied by optional English subtitles.
The 1953 Vice Squad is so jam-packed with delights it is hard to know where to begin except that obviously, Robinson is the capo di tutti capi of the film’s pleasures. He plays a ‘captain’ of detectives in Los Angeles overseeing crimes of all different sorts—the only reason the film has the name it does is because prostitutes play a role in solving one of the crimes and the marketers wanted to make sure potential audiences knew that sin was part of the storyline—while also doing community outreach work such as television interviews about his job. Running 88 minutes, the film actually has three separate plot strands and crimes, although two of them are inter-related, and plays as if it were a television pilot ahead of its time. In one crime, a policeman happens upon two men hotwiring a car and is shot when he tries to stop them. In the second, a stoolie reports to Robinson—after having been arrested in a ‘misunderstanding’—that he knows about a bank robbery that is supposed to go down soon. Finally, girl with connections comes to Robinson to complain that an Italian ‘count’ is romancing her widowed mother and not paying for anything. Oh, and there is also another little tiny (but very ‘meta’) story when another character wants to see Robinson’s character because he is being haunted by ‘television shadows’ when he walks on the street. Since the film crosscuts between the investigations and all of these characters trying to see Robinson’s character in his office, it is a wonderfully busy movie, with Robinson serving as sort of a commanding master of ceremonies as you bask in his authoritarian flair.
And, it is full of stars. Remember Paulette Goddard? She broke out as one of Charlie Chaplin’s better discoveries, and came this close to playing Scarlett O’Hara (her screen test rocked) while scoring with a few more comedies and then settling back into secondary dramatic roles and television. Well, you can’t imagine the peals of joy that you will emit when you see her playing a bordello (excuse us, ‘escort service’) madam who has information about one of the bank robbers. She clearly brings her comedy skills to the role just as clearly as she suppresses them, and she is unafraid to show why youth-obsessed Hollywood is passing her by for the bigger parts. Her scenes with Robinson, whether on the phone or supposedly in the same room, are hold-your-breath worthy. And then guess who is hotwiring the car in the very first scene of the film? None other than Lee Van Cleef! He reappears throughout the movie, being the first man to commit a crime and the last man busted, and of course, you are riveted to him every moment he is on the screen glowering at his fellow bandits. The other players may have less familiar names, including Peter Hall, Edward Binns, Adam Williams, Jay Adler, Percy Helton and Barry Kelley, but you will recognize them as old friends the instant you see them. A delightful starlet named Mary Ellen Kay has an important role and is dressed in an impressive sweater that would not be out of fashion today, except that she wears glasses (which are necessary for a plot advancement), something she clearly has never done in real life although she still is quite fetching whether she is wearing them or not.
Technically, the film is a procedural, but what a procedural! Under the instructions of Robinson’s character, the cops arrest witnesses on phony charges to pressure them, burgle offices to find leads, smash down doors of suspects without knocking and organize the most cringe-inducing, modern-practices-defying, citizen-endangering bank stakeout imaginable. Every moment of the film is a blast. There is also a terrific jump scream near the end, during the grand suspense finale. The full screen source material is somewhat regularly visited by small scratches and speckles, but otherwise it looks terrific, with sharp contrasts and minimal grain. The monophonic sound is a little noisy as well, but workable.
Opening on Death Row, Black Tuesday is ‘pure cinema’ in the best sense. Yes, there is dialog that advances the narrative, but it is always part of the poetry of the film’s sound mix, which is blended and rhymed with the poetry of the film’s striking images and the full miasma of the film’s no-nonsense performances. Directed by Hugo Fregonese with cinematography by Stanley Cortez, the 1954 ‘B’ feature should be studied for how brilliantly its economic staging and beautiful artistry are constructed to push forth a compelling and engaging narrative. Even the performances are part of the film’s synergetic impact. Robinson is first seen pacing in his cell like a caged lion, and you know instantly that his character is irredeemably evil and deserves to die. Hence, every moment he is part of the frame he brings his entire legacy of villains and confused protagonists to his role, and then doubles down on their presence in his eyes and his gritted teeth. Peter Graves is in the next cell. His character is more stoic, his soul is more ambiguous, and sitting on a stash of money that is hidden somewhere in the outside world, he remains that way until the end. To say any more about the plot would undermine the thrills the 81-minute entertainment delivers, but rest assured there is action, there is drama, there is suspense, there is spiritual uplift and there is the subliminal excitement of cinematic expression in every scene.
Again, there are a number of supporting cast members that you will readily recognize, even if you don’t know their names, including Jean Parker, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, Milburn Stone, William Schallert and Russell Johnson (of Gilligan’s Island fame). Using a bare minimum of sets, Fregonese and Cortez continually enhance every moment of the film by their blocking and lighting choices. The images, which are letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1, are never showy, but they are never boring or mindlessly composed, either. From overly tight close-ups to shots from the sidewalk looking up, the film has one visual confection after another. While there is a general grain to the image as a whole, the transfer has clearly coaxed every intention the filmmakers had with the budget they were given onto the screen. We spotted one faint and fleeting mark, but otherwise there appears to be no actual flaw in the presentation, although frankly we were too bedazzled by the story to look for them. The sound mix is a model of perfectly inserted effects to convey a sense of the outside world, and the soundtrack is clean and strong. A trailer is included.
Film historian Gary Gerani provides very good commentary tracks on both Vice Squad and Black Tuesday, going into details about the backgrounds of the casts and the crews, pointing out the nuances within each narrative and explaining how the films reflect popular entertainment tropes of their day (summarizing one of the appeals of Vice Squad, he explains, “Movie viewers have always gotten a thrill out of seeing minions of the Law behaving like the ruthless criminals they pursue, perhaps reinforcing some perverse awareness that the jungle is indeed all around us, with law and order, maybe even humanism and civilization itself, hanging by the most slender of threads.”). For Black Tuesday, he obtained access to much of the film’s production files and is able to share everything from budget details to censor complaints, as well as the intentions of the shooting script. He also has time to ponder the film’s meanings. “‘I didn’t want to put on a party for the state,’ he rants, ‘That’s why I’m nuts, because I want to keep on breathing…’ is pretty much what his philosophy amounts to, with the gangster defending in an almost elemental and existential way his right to life itself. This pretty much underscores the theme to Black Tuesday. Does the very act of living justify the taking of other lives? Given the callous response to execution we’ve just seen dramatized, are all of us part of the same hypocrisy, one way or another?”
Robinson is billed above the title in the 1956 Nightmare, but he actually has a supporting part. Based upon a marvelously quizzical story by Cornell Woolrich, a very young Kevin McCarthy stars as a jazz clarinetist who dreams that he has killed a man and then discovers indications that the murder may have actually happened. Robinson is the brother-in-law of McCarthy’s character, and is also a New Orleans homicide detective. Whatever you do, try not to look at the jacket cover as you are removing the disc for play (each BD comes in an individual jacket in the set) or on the rear of the box jacket, where it also appears, because it contains a horrendous spoiler (it’s not really Kino’s fault, since the jacket is a replication of the film’s original ad artwork) and once you see it you will be two steps ahead of the heroes as they try to figure out what is going on. Directed by Maxwell Shane, there is a wonderful mirrored closet set that gets used several times to good effect, and the Herschel Burke Gilbert and Billy May jazz score complements the film’s visual designs efficiently. Running 89 minutes, the film is a great deal of fun, with Woolrich’s plotting justifying the convoluted puzzle at least from a cursory perspective. The time that Robinson is on the screen (it is a decent sized part, and he has a few scenes without McCarthy) makes your heart go pitter-patter in a way that McCarthy’s screen presence, for all of his eager youth and subsequent legacy, never replicates.
Letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1, the image is often soft and the stock footage of New Orleans is a bit rough, but it still appears that the transfer is the best that could possibly be extracted from the source material. The audio has a strong bass presence for its day and has smooth, clean tones. Film historian Jason Ney provides an excellent commentary track, deconstructing the original Woolrich story and the variations that have made it to the screen, going over the careers of the cast and the crew, examining the nature of consciousness and other topics explored by the film and talking about the resurgence of United Artists in the early Fifties because of the unrestrictive deals they offered to various filmmakers.
Vintage western
Time has been kind to Don Siegel’s 1976 Paramount production, The Shootist, released on Blu-ray by Paramount and Arrow Video (UPC#760137144885, $40). Almost intentionally created as John Wayne’s swan song, it seemed too purposeful upon release, too self-aware and, behind that self-awareness, too artificial in its constructs. Wayne is an aging gunfighter, first seen from afar with mountains looming behind him, who knows he has cancer and takes up residence in his doctor’s town to spend his final days, ultimately arranging a showdown with three other gunfighters who have grudges against him. The film is set pointedly in 1901—Wayne’s character studiously reads a newspaper report about the death of Queen Victoria—and the town he has settled in ‘Carson City, Nevada,’ has automobiles, telephones and plans to electrify its trolley system. Clearly, his character’s time and era are over. But now, not only Wayne, but a majority of his co-stars, including Lauren Bacall, James Stewart, Hugh O’Brian, John Carradine, Richard Boone, Scatman Crothers, Harry Morgan, Sheree North and Bill McKinney, have passed away, while the young Ron Howard (who has the most ambiguous and intriguing performance) is permanently retired from acting. The film no longer feels urgent, and at the same time, its initial seeds have flowered. Wayne’s performance is beautiful. He is calm, affecting, wise and quite adeptly channeling his own sense of mortality into his character. He only resisted portraying a caricature of his iconography in a handful of films during the Sixties and Seventies, which made this final effort all the more touching. Bacall is wonderful, too, also free of the self parody she brought to many of her later roles, and the others are all having a great time doing their gigs. The period setting is indeed lovely, while there is just enough action to give the 99-minute feature momentum and foreboding as it enables the performances to reflect the essence of the era. At one point, Bacall’s character is sitting at a piano, playing and singing a Gilbert & Sullivan tune, when Wayne’s character walks into the room and begins to sing along. Not only does the moment capture the home entertainment of the era perfectly, but the song, Tit Willow, is a wonderfully wicked lampoon of death and dying, which wittily seems to be going over the heads of the characters. The film has become the elegiac western it strove to become, because Siegel astutely assembled all of its parts with an assured compositional finesse, and just needed more years to go by until those parts could age comfortably into one expression, the way that a telephoto lens brings objects that are far apart together to share the same field of view.
The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1. The cinematography is grainy at times, depending upon the amount of available light and the editing choices that enhance some close-ups, but the transfer looks beautiful, with fresh colors, and when the image is sharp, particularly in the outdoor sun, the image is smooth. The mix of grainy and less grainy images also underscores one of the film’s themes regarding the transition from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries in a way that communicates with the subconscious of the viewer, particularly because the transfer is so clearly accurate. The monophonic is okay, and there is an elaborate Elmer Bernstein score, although it is not one of his best efforts. There are optional English subtitles; a very good collection of memorabilia from around the world in still frame; a trailer; an 18-minute retrospective documentary that is buried near the end of the Special Features menu but ought to be watched first as a general introduction to the film’s production particulars; a nice 24-minute rumination over Wayne’s talent that touches briefly on his political views; an interesting 40-minute profile of author Glendon Swarthout, the many films made from his books and how The Shootist aligns with the novel; and an excellent 27-minute deconstruction of Bernstein’s score (Bacall’s character and Wayne’s character have specific themes, but at one point, Bacall’s theme is performed with the instruments used for Wayne’s theme). Also featured is a highly entertaining 28-minute look at the making of the film and the careers of Siegel and Wayne, with lots of great clips (although it mistakenly claims that Wayne’s characters never died on the screen until the Seventies) and great insider information (Wayne had face lifts).
While it is not as improvisational or as giddy as his best talks, film enthusiast Howard Berger provides a thoroughly researched commentary track, diving into the problems surrounding Wayne’s health while making the film and Wayne’s difficulties accepting orders from Siegel. He articulates the film’s strengths (“An elegantly purposeful piece of work, it may contain familiar western tropes, but more powerfully, it makes them bend to emotions not typically examined in stories about men as hard as [Wayne’s character].”), pays tribute to the other members of the cast and the crew and shares plenty of anecdotes about the production.
Mann entertainment in 4K
Michael Mann is a romanticist. His films (and TV shows) are among the most modern being made, but as much as they are streamlined and ‘cool,’ they also have constant flourish. With pulsating music and a tendency to dwarf individuals within their surroundings, he embellishes the atmosphere around his characters even as he appears to strip down the details of their lives. They seem to melt into the mood of the film itself. It is no wonder that one of his first cinematic hits was based upon an early Nineteenth Century novel, because he has never really left that period of literature even as he shifted to modern settings. When he tries to make an important work he often falls short because he places too much focus on the core emotions, underlining his messages (his most honored films are invariably overrated), but when he is just creating entertainment, the results are as dazzling as they are indulgent. As for his 2015 international procedural thriller from Universal, Blackhat, it has a very silly story about the FBI arranging the release of a computer hacker, played by Chris Hemsworth, so he can team up with a pair of Chinese computer experts played by Leehom Wang and Wei Tang, and an FBI agent played by Viola Davis, to—as it turns out—save the world from an evil master criminal bent upon making millions. So this movie you don’t have to take seriously, and as a result, every moment of it is enthralling fun, and all the more so because Universal and Arrow Video have released a fantastic two-platter 4K UHD Blu-ray (UPC#76013712-3774, $50).
The colors on the 4K presentation are exact, and that precision is hyper-magnified because of what Mann is doing with the images to begin with. The film opens like an adult version of Tron, diving into the circuits behind a flashing light on a panel and then descending deeper and smaller until you are following the molecular bits that are making the decisions to become zeros and ones to send the signal. In 4K, the crispness of the image and the delineation of the hues are especially captivating, so that the film has already won you over by the quality of its images and its sound alone. When it pulls back to depict Wang’s character, a high ranking officer in the Chinese military, explaining that he recognizes the code he is looking at as being a garbled up version of the code Hemsworth’s character once wrote when they were buds in college, you are totally on board for the ride they are going to take together. Shot in America and Asia, the location visuals on the letterboxed image, which has an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1, don’t just give you a tour of exotic locales, they transport you there, as Mann’s intoxicating atmosphere leaves you just clearheaded enough to register what is happening at every moment within the film. Other than a fistfight in a restaurant, the first action scene doesn’t occur until well into the 133-minute feature, but when the gunshots start going off, the already smooth and finely detailed 5.1-channel DTS sound suddenly starts whacking you from every direction, and you really wonder when it was the last time you had so much grown up fun.
The platter also contains a 122-minute ‘International’ version, but the only difference it has is the removal of a few specific references to the Hispanic backgrounds of some bad guys. Along with optional English subtitles and a very small collection of publicity photos in still frame, there is a decent 19-minute interview with cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh in which he talks about the digital cameras he was using and their lighting capabilities, as well as what it was like working with Mann; a 31-minute interview with production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas; and a terrific 40-minute collection of promotional featurettes that include interviews with Mann, Hemsworth, other members of the cast and crew, and the hackers who consulted on the production.
Film enthusiasts Bryan Reesman and Max Evry supply a very good commentary. They make no bones about the film’s flaws, but still analyze its artistry, go over the backgrounds of Mann and Hemsworth in detail and the other cast and crew members in a more cursory fashion, and talk extensively about real computer hacking, what the film gets right and what it doesn’t. On the whole, they have more enthusiasm for Mann’s qualifications than we do, but we would concur entirely with their assessment of the movie at hand. “What Mann did here is make a perfectly serviceable programmer. It’s a B movie, but I mean that with the most affection. You can poke all these holes in the characters and the narrative because it doesn’t matter. It’s a modest B programmer with maybe a little sly commentary and, of course, many of Mann’s signature obsessions. It’s not him on autopilot, but rather him servicing a more conventional, more by-the-numbers experience.”
The second platter is a standard Blu-ray that contains an alternate 132-minute Director’s Cut that is substantially different than the theatrical version. There is very little in the way of added footage, but Mann moves a significant sequence from the beginning of the movie to near the end of the second act, and adjusts other references accordingly. Why he does this is a mystery (apparently, it was the order that was originally intended), since the film works much better the other way around, giving substantially more justification to the involvement of Wang’s character, but it does provide a good excuse to go on the thrill ride with him again. Since it is a standard Blu-ray, the image, while it still looks terrific, is not as crisp as the 4K presentation, making the film less involving as a result. The 5.1-channel DTS sound also has a slightly less aggressive presence, although overall the film remains an enjoyable globetrotting action feature. Reesman and Evry detail the major and minor changes Mann made to the movie near the end of their commentary on the theatrical version, and explain why he felt compelled to go back and take another stab at it.
History from the other side
There were two types of people in the world in February of 2020, those who were going about their regular business and those who had locked themselves in their closets and were frantically trying to buy HAZMAT suits online because they had seen Steven Soderbergh’s remarkably prescient 2011 feature about an unrestrained virus spreading around the globe, Contagion. We reviewed Warner Home Entertainment’s Blu-ray release in Jan 12. Now that we are on the other side of history, however, Warner and SDS Studio Distribution Services have released a 4K UltraHD Blu-ray (UPC#883929-820856, $34), which is well worth watching again, since it got so very many things right and so very little not right (the website tracking the deaths in each state was non-existent in the film, where a character complains about the lack of a central organization for that information, and however inaccurate it may have been, it was adeptly maintained and a viable information tool in real life). What the film gets right is just about everything—it begins in China (although the fault is an international company that Gwyneth Paltrow’s character works for, cutting down forests), spreads haphazardly around the world as people who understand the true threat take precautions while others are oblivious until it is too late, causes massive shortages of goods and services (not toilet paper specifically, but the movie still conveys the idea), is subject to fantasy cures encouraged by the Internet (through a character played by Jude Law) which grab hold of the imagination of the populace as actual cures take much longer to develop, and that things do finally subside to a semblance of the old normal once a vaccine is fast tracked and disseminated. It gets many smaller details right as well (first there’s a cough, then there’s a fever…), and some of the exaggerations (things fall a little too quickly into chaos; the disease appears to be partially transmitted by touching things) are more of a dealer’s choice (Chicago gets hit big instead of New York) than an actual failure of insight on the part of Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns.
Matt Damon plays Paltrow’s husband, who tries to get on with life and protect his daughter after his wife succumbs to the disease. He represents a ‘common man’ thread running through the 106-minute film, which intercuts his experiences with the experiences of medical investigators—Laurence Fishburne plays a CDC official, Elliot Gould is an independent doctor, and Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston and Kate Winslet are also featured—in America and China. The film, which had the aura of a TV disaster movie, was entertaining on the standard BD, but it is even more transfixing as a 4K release after the fact. Paced by the pulsating Cliff Martinez musical score, the film is more involving because people now very much understand concepts like the R0 contagion rates and why masks are such a good idea, but also because the subliminal precision of the 4K image is ideal for the structure of the film. It takes less time to focus on what is happening because the images are literally better focused, so while the standard BD is still great entertainment, you can’t quite keep up with the nuances as you can on the 4K presentation. The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1.
The DTS sound was really nice on the BD, but the Dolby Atmos audio on the 4K version is even better, with a more elaborate separation mix and stronger tones to keep your excitement up. There are alternate French, Spanish, Italian, German and Czech audio tracks, 15 optional subtitle tracks including English, and the same 18 minutes of worthwhile featurettes that appeared on the BD.
Colorful Renoir
Following on Laurence Olivier’s cute theatricalization of Henry V, Jean Renoir did a somewhat more sophisticated twist of the same gimmick with his wonderful 1955 farce, The Golden Coach, which has been released on Blu-ray by Raro Video and Kino Lorber (UPC#738329265526, $30). Like Henry V, the film opens and closes looking at a theatrical stage and the players upon it, but as it gets underway, the stage’s setting transitions to movie sets until the finale. Renoir’s addition is that the characters seem to be at least partially aware of their metaphysics. They react to one another emotionally, but they also acknowledge or half-acknowledge their status as characters on a stage. “Where does the theater end and life begin?” the heroine asks at one point. It complicates matters that many of the characters are stage performers, an Italian troupe that has crossed the Atlantic to play in the capital of a Spanish South American territory in the Eighteenth Century. Anna Magnani stars as the troupe’s headliner and Duncan Lamont is the viceroy who becomes smitten with her (she has other suitors, too), causing a ruckus when he gifts her the titular coach. The film has other characters and bounces back and forth between the stage antics within the film and the characters wooing Magnani’s character. The film is in English (there is also a French audio track, but the default is English and matches the lip movements) and the performances of Magnani and Lamont are wonderfully loose and modern. Renoir chose Anton Vivaldi pieces for his musical score, but Magnani and Lamont play their parts like jazz musicians, riffing their emotions while they say their lines, and somehow, thanks to Renoir’s magical command, everything remains in perfect harmony. Not only does the film seem fresh despite its period setting, it still seems fresh today and will continue to do so as long as there is acting and romance.
The full screen picture looks lovely. The colors are bright and fleshtones are accurate. Featuring compositionally engaging cinematography by Renoir’s nephew, Claude Renoir, the image does not have the slickness of a Hollywood production, but otherwise it is smooth and accurate. Color detail is critical to the film’s expressiveness and is conveyed effectively. The monophonic sound is okay. Renoir expert Adam Nayman supplies a serviceable commentary, although he starts speaking less in the film’s second half. He touches base on the background of the story itself, the careers of the cast and the crew, and the history of the film’s production, but he focuses primarily on the plot and Renoir’s direction. “One of the critical common places about Renoir is his mastery of the moving camera, creating space as he moves the camera, creating these incredible visual relationships, these networks of relationships as he moves through space. You’ll notice here how incredibly static the compositions in this film are, and this is very deliberate. That obviously is tied to this idea of theatricality. The static-ness of the camera—it will move, it will pan back, it will sometimes explore space—that static-ness is a real break in Renoir’s style. And so, in lieu of the dynamism created by movements—the dynamism is created by color, by the use of color to activate different parts of the screen, the use of color to symbolize different feelings and ideas for the characters.”
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